“In Pieces of Places, my recent paintings take inspiration from the grandeur and mystery of landscapes encountered on my travels to the Arctic on an ice-class schooner. Like early explorers of the world who could only bring back abstract impressions of their experiences to the masses, I do not attempt to deliver precise visual accounts of my travels to the viewer, instead I create composite landscapes from both photographic and mental image sources. My pictures are pieces of places, an amalgam that I conflate, rearrange, and manipulate. These places in their preternatural glow, seem as real to me as any. While historically landscape painting has aimed to exalt the beauty of the natural world, and therefore underline our place in it, my works seek to present a disquieting sense of uncertainty. Our place in nature is not as simple as it once was.” — Saul Becker